Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Highest-Paid California Trooper Is Chief Banking $484,000 -
(www.bloomberg.com) California
Highway Patrol division chief Jeff Talbott retired last year as
the best-paid officer in the 12 most-populous U.S. states, collecting $483,581
in salary, pension and other compensation. Talbott, 53, received $280,259 for
accrued leave and vacation time and took a new job running the public-safety
department at a private university in Southern California.
He also began collecting an annual pension of $174,888 from the state.
Union-negotiated benefits, coupled with
overtime that can exceed regular pay and lax enforcement of limits on
accumulating unused vacation, allow some troopers to double their annual
earnings and retire as young as age 50. The payments they get are unmatched by
those elsewhere, according to data compiled by Bloomberg on 1.4 million
employees of the 12 states. Some, like Talbott, go on to second careers. “I
think some of our rules were negligent, and I think people were allowed to
build up overtime pay who shouldn’t have been, who accumulated leave time and
furlough time,” said Marty Morgenstern, a member of Governor Jerry
Brown’s cabinet and secretary of the California Labor &
Workforce Development Agency, which oversees labor relations, employment and
unemployment.

Banker
sleeps rough in park - (www.bbc.co.uk)
Britain is in the grip of a
housing crisis of a sort not seen before, where even the most unexpected people
are losing their homes. Kevin Browne is an investment banker. He moved to
America and ran his own firm until the crash in 2008. His company went bust and
his marriage fell apart. He eventually lost his home and returned to England on
a flight paid for by a charity. BBC Panorama met him last summer while he was
sleeping rough in a park in Croydon. Panorama:
Britain's Hidden Housing Crisis, BBC One, Thursday, 13 December
at 21:00 GMT and then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.

Debt Loads Climb in Buyout Deals - (online.wsj.com) Private-equity firms are
using almost as much debt to fund acquisitions as they did before the financial
crisis, as return-hungry investors rush to buy bonds and loans backing those
takeovers. The rise in borrowed money, or leverage, heralds the possibility of
juicy returns for buyout groups. Ominously, the surge also brings back memories
of the last credit binge around six years ago, which saddled dozens of
companies with huge levels of debt. Some companies laden with debt by
private-equity firms in the mid 2000s foundered during the recession. "Leverage
is a double-edged sword," said Mark Goldstein, an investment banker to
private-equity firms for RBC Capital Markets. "The gain is greater if the
investment works out, but the consequence is also greater if things don't go as
planned."

Nightmare
infrastructure of subdivision houses - (www.kunstler.com) Even if the so-called economy
were "recovering," the people of the USA would be stuck in a physical
setting for daily life that has no future - the nightmare infrastructure of
subdivision houses, strip malls, and WalMarts, all rigged up for incessant
motoring. Of course, the so-called economy is not recovering because there is
no more cheap oil. If oil ever gets cheap again, it will be because nobody has
enough money to pay for it and surely you can connect the dots to what that
hamster wheel of futility means. In fact, the heart of our
economic predicament is that the American economy came to be based on the
construction of ever more suburban stuff, the financing of which, especially
the houses, became the fodder for an episode of epic swindles that has left our
banking system a hollowed out shell of accounting fraud. In short, we built
even more stuff with no future, and ruined our society in the process. How
tragic is that?

Greece's lenders warn of "very large" risks to
bailout - (www.reuters.com) Political resistance and potential court
challenges are among "very large" risks to reforms required for Greece's bailout programme, the country's
European lenders said on Monday. The long-awaited report from the European
Commission and the European Central Bank details the findings of the
"troika" of the EC, ECB and the International Monetary Fund on
Athens' efforts to meet targets under its latest rescue package. The report
formally confirmed that Greece deserved further aid under the
130-billion-euro (104 billion pounds) bailout, and a Greek finance ministry
source said Athens had received a long-delayed instalment of over 34 billion
euros in aid on Monday. But the lenders warned Athens still risked falling
short on its commitments. "The key risks concern the overall policy
implementation, given that the coalition supporting the government appears
fragile and some components of the programme face political resistance, despite
the determination of the government," the report said.